Why too much care for your child can harm society

What should we do about the kids? Families are mini-civilisations; experience and research show they are the best means of rearing our young into fulfilled adulthood. But families are the prisons that can deform individuals for life and whose private arrangements generate fantastic inequality for society beyond.

Parenting offers endless dilemmas - navigating your way between throwing a protective mantle around your children, and knowing that it is only by withdrawing the mantle that they can achieve the independence necessary to you and them. There are also pernicious social consequences from your family choices. Should you care? In conservative times, we hear much about the benefits of family, too little about the degree family can be bad both for children and for our wider society.

One of the consequences of Tory MP Derek Conway losing his job for giving his sons our money for doing nothing is that a spotlight has been shone on the dubious practice of MPs employing family members and the culture that justifies it. In conservative lore, nothing should prevent - certainly no obligation to society - parents being able to give everything to the children they love, the tearjerker argument that shadow Chancellor George Osborne used to justify his proposed lifting of the threshold for inheritance tax to a £1m.

Conway, the bone-headed Tory, was merely stretching that philosophy to the limits, but has found that there are obligations, such as accountability and propriety, that get in the way. It was public money he had been spending. The case was open and shut. But parallel arguments extend to the private sphere, as Nigella Lawson showed in a widely publicised interview in My Weekly. She differed from her husband, Charles Saatchi, she said, about how much of their estimated £110m fortune they should leave their children. Echoing American billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, she believed that too much inherited money corrupts children; they need to work. Her husband took the premodern, dynastic and conservative view that every penny should be passed on with the DNA.

On her website, Ms Lawson subsequently revealed that this shouldn't be understood as a desire to leave her children destitute. It is about choosing between leaving nothing and everything, a debate about degree that extends well beyond the Lawson/Saatchi family. In an era of sky-high house prices, how much of the equity in your home should you give to your children to buy theirs? How much inheritance should you leave them? How much should you be the 'helicopter parent' hovering obsessively over your offspring and fighting for the best across the board?

Plainly, you can and must enable your children: to prohibit them from accessing what you have and who you are is impossible and would be counter to our deepest instincts. But at what point does such enablement become destructive for them and for society? A generation ago, there would have been very many more who took Nigella Lawson's view that the bias must be to help children stand on their own two feet. Now the doctrine is that the family must rule.

Today's parents have become obsessive about their children, relentlessly buying them every advantage they can which they cap with the promise of the maximum inheritance. It is not just the growth of tutoring and private schools; it extends to university. Dr Paul Redmond, Liverpool University's head of careers and employability, tells how a growing number of parents challenge exam results, attend career fairs and even negotiate their children's first salaries.

It is parents who are behind the new market in downloadable, prewritten essays. Parents use every tool possible to advance their child's cause and universities are developing a response. Huddersfield University is the first to have a parents' liaison officer; many universities now have 'parent packs'.

As Redmond says, this hyperactivity beyond a certain age actively harms children. Employers want rounded, self-starting adults, not overgrown children used to their parents constantly bailing them out when called upon. The mobile phone is an often disastrous kind of umbilical cord. Too much parental involvement infantilises children, whether driving them a few hundred yards to school when they are teenagers or joining them for interviews with potential employers when they are young adults. Expectations of future inheritance tends to remove a key spur to self-improvement and self-control.

Fewer and fewer of the very rich consider bequesting their assets to charity, a university or a great cause; the volume of giving has remained static over the last decade despite the upsurge in private wealth. They would rather spend it on themselves and leave the rest to their children.

A recent London School of Economics report shows that Britain has the highest number of family firms managed by children of the founder; it is a managerial disaster, a potent explanation of our poor productivity. Few think to challenge the practice or endorse the call for higher inheritance tax to check it.

Part of the explanation is the privatisation of the public sphere. The more the realm of the private grows, the less accountability and fairness can be expected. That old injunction that it's not what you know, it's who you know seems truer than ever. The only network you can rely on is family.

This is reinforced by a mawkish conservatism that celebrates blood, tribe and nation; we are not a society trying to advance together but a network of concentric blood rings radiating out from family, in which case we had better look out for our own.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that the existential freedom to make and remake one's life could only be achieved by rounded adults and that adulthood required rupturing the bonds with one's parents to reconstruct them later. Parents setting out to cosset their kids surely have a greater obligation: to help them become adults in the best sense of that term. The paradox is that you make that rite of passage harder by gilding it too much with family advantage. Our private and public choices should reflect that truth.